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So lets be honest here. Watching corporate advertising on YouTube is not my favourite thing to do. But watching people I know... People who are passionate and articulate and who are talking about a subject they understand with tremendous depth... that's worth taking your time to check out.
Brian Carmody is the XIV Technical Product Manager. There are few people who can explain a deeply... [More]

One of the many popular features of the XIV is the ability to replicate using iSCSI. On XIV Gen3 there are now at least 10 and up to 22 active iSCSI ports on each machine (depending on how many modules you order). Implementation of the iSCSI connection between two XIVs is a piece of cake. If both XIVs are defined to the XIV GUI (which they should be), you just need to drag and drop links... [More]

With the announcement that you can order an XIV with 3 TB SAS disks, IBM now have some amazing capacity options and some equally clever growth options with XIV Gen3. As you hopefully know, the XIV consists of modules that each contain 12 disks. An XIV can have 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 or 15 modules (all modules must have the same size disk). You can start at any of those points and then grow... [More]

It is that time of the year - IBM Storage announcements time. The number and depth of announcements is a bit over whelming.... there are so many things to talk about. The good news is that my fellow bloggers are producing mountains of great content so please check them out: Tony Pearson The Storage Buddhist Rawley Burbridge Barry Whyte You can also check out a list of all the announcements here .

It seems like only yesterday that it was November 2010. IBM started shipping a new product, and yet a product with an 8 year heritage: The Storwize V7000. It was a very clever decision, taking the mature and very popular SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and packaging it with the latest SAS enclosure technology and offering it as a midrange storage product. Since IBM started shipping the Storwize V7000,... [More]

For those of you with Apple iPads, you might consider dropping by the Apple Store and picking up your free IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard. The IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard application can be used to securely monitor the performance and health of your XIV over a Wi-Fi or 3G link. Having downloaded and installed the Mobile Dashboard you will get a lovely XIV Icon: When you start the Mobile Dashboard you... [More]

For those of you planning to move to ESXi 5.0, IBM have found an annoying (but not show stopping) issue with the way XCOPY is implemented in the VAAI driver. With ESX/EXi 4.1, IBM supplied the VAAI driver, but with ESXi 5.0 this changed and VMware now manage this themselves. It has since emerged that the way VMware implemented XCOPY in this driver does not totally work with the way IBM... [More]

I just discovered that you can find freaky blue aliens wearing sun-glasses in release 3.0 of the XIV GUI. Just go to the Users icon (the padlock) and take the option to Add User Group. I think you will find the new grouped users icon rather amusing. I don't know if I prefer the dude with sunglasses or the two faceless people behind him (or her... or it). Here are two groups I created, inspired... [More]

The eternal question: Which hardware/software combinations are tested and supported? If you use IBM Storage hardware and you need to answer this question you need to be using the IBM System Storage Interoperation Center, or SSIC , which you will find here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss I use this site a lot and rely heavily on the output it creates. ... [More]

I know the walls are coming down... but there are still many organizational barriers that can exist in IT. How about: The Networking team (who may possibly be allied to or at war with the firewall/security team) The Storage admin team (possibly split between open and System z) The Systems admin teams (possibly split between System z and open and then split again into Windows and Unix or VMware... [More]